About The Writers

Friday, October 12, 2012

Really Knowing Your Characters

By Maggie

One of my nieces is getting married in Maryland this
weekend . I’m very excited to be here with many of my East coast family, including
my sisters. It isn’t often that all six of us sisters are in the same place for
a joyous occasion. With all us in our 50’s and 60’s now, you could say my
sisters and I are one interesting bunch of bananas. I could write a novel about
each one of us or all of us. For a while I had it in my mind to write a book
titled “The Daughters of Helen.” Each of us would tell our story. Maybe I’ll do
that one day. Thinking about this makes me realize how easy our characters
would be to ‘flesh out,’ as they say. I know us all that well: the good and
bad, the flawed and perfect, the hopes and fears, the mistakes and the
triumphs. To have believable and authentic characters in our writing, we need
to do the same thing: know them that well.

My writing style tends to be of the ‘jump in and
write’ variety with not a lot of prep work beforehand. Iget know my characters as I write their story.
As fun as this may be, maybe what I need to do is sit down and take the time to
get to know my people inside and out, the protagonist at the very least.

This is probably not a trip that will have a lot of
down time, but I am looking at two 3-4 hour flights here. So, here’s my plan:
I’ll write down everything I know about my protagonist so far, three chapters
into my novel.While I’m doing this,
I’ll really, really think about her. What does she want? How did she get where
she is right now? Where is she flawed or perfect, good or bad? How has she
triumphed or failed? I need to know all of it to make her real on the page and
make readers care.

3 comments:

I lived with mine, or at least the folks that my characters are modeled after, off and on for 15 years while working in South Africa. They were my friends, my antagonists, the people I read about in the papers while living in Cape Town. Now I have to change the names to protect the guilty.

Hi Maggie -- I like to write from multiple points of view, so I try to "become" that character when I'm writing his or her scenes. It was especially fun when writing the bad guys in my last manuscript. I think I have an inner thug trying to get out. :D

Mine slowly open up as I ask a few questions. Then I put them in places to see how they react. Sometimes they choose to turn left instead of right...so I watch and learn. It's their pretend life, I let them live it...